Best Ethnographic Sites?

[yuanzhumin]

For a trip, Paris is a center of ethnographic art with all its specialised galeries in the city itself or in the Saint Ouen Flea Market, on its periphery. For the museums, the recently opened Museum of Quai Branly shouldn't be missed even if some may not like the way the pieces are displayed there. This museum has one of the biggest, if not the biggest, collection of primitive art. On its 300 000 pieces collected, only 3 000 are exhibited. It has a branch in the Louvre Museum with one hundred primitive art masterworks displayed there that should not be missed either - among them, an extraordinary Paiwan central house pillar.
Here is the link to the museum (most of its collections can be seen online):
http://www2.quaibranly.fr/index.php?id=accueil
In Taipei, where I live, ethnographic museums or exhibits are very small and limited to the formosan aboriginal art (we had one temporary exhibit of African primitive art few years ago). The Shungyi Museum of Formosan Art is the easiest to visit as it is located nearly next to the National Palace Museum and very well organised. Then, there is mostly the National Taiwan Museum, the Taiwan National University Exhibit Hall (only open 4 h a week) and the Academia Sinica (closed for a while as it is going through renovation works).

[ArmsAndAntiques]

Several more museums to visit, I'm surprised some of these have yet to be mentioned.

Newark Museum- One of the finest collections of Tibetan items in the Western Hemisphere (at least on display, the Smithsonian Anthropology archives has some top notch stuff but it's all packed away) They have a magnificent Ottoman dagger in quasi-Sino-Tibetan mounts. Really interesting as well as some Indonesian and other items. Worth the visit if you want to brave downtown Newark. Not so bad really.

Walters Museum of Art (Baltimore)- World class quality Islamic arms and armor, some fine Japanese items, and some European.

Art Institute of Chicago- Awesome section on European arms and armor. They have some wonderful stuff in the archives also.

Museum of Cultural History (Oslo)- great ethnographic collection. I'm always surprised by how much is in Scandinavia, and Norway in particular, until you realize they were part of the Danes for so long and the seafaring merchants and burghers of Oslo must have brought back loads of stuff as well.

Forsvarsmuseet (Oslo)- A great military museum with quite a few ethnographic items in the mix. Main focus on Europe but a real cracker jack collection, with awesome cannons especially. One of the only real sled cannons I've seen in person.

Many more out there. A comprehensive list would be ideal. But not enough time...

[Rich]

While I don't have a list of museums, other than the Smithsonian in DC, I do have a lot of links to other ethnographic weapons sites on my website. The
specific page is:

http://japaneseswordindex.com/world.htm

Hope you find some of the links useful. A few may be out of date as I haven't done a full link check for my entire site in a long time. No doubt most of you know about many of them already.

Rich S

[Pieje]

A must when in the region (Brussels/Belgium): http://www.africamuseum.be/home?set_language=en&cl=en

Unfortunately it just closed its doors for a three year renovation period.

With an online collection database: http://www.africamuseum.be/collectio...humansciences/

[Congoblades]

So when you visit Belgium there is also the musee africain de Namur, not as big as the Africamuseum in Brussels but surely worth a visit. There are lots of weapons on display. http://www.museeafricainnamur.be

[Pieje]

To stay in Belgium...a couple of shots from weapons on display in the Afrika Museum (former Congo Museum) in Tervuren/Brussels.